You, Andrew Marvell by Archibald Macleish

Poets today who write in form (with a meter and a rhyme scheme) will often try to hide/temper the form so that the poem doesn't sound like a Hallmark card. This poem's form--four-beat lines (And here face down beneath the sun) with end rhymes--tends to strike the contemporary ear as very Hallmark. Macleish makes it work though, using slight rhythmical shifts and no punctuation to present a slow and stately music, which highlights (and even embodies) the relentless "coming on...of night." I love how the poem's images are sharp and exotic, but its scope is global and eternal. It makes me think of one of those space shots of the earth: you imagine the earth teeming with history and civilization, but also see that it's just a big ball rolling and rolling along.



You, Andrew Marvell
By Archibald Macleish

And here face down beneath the sun
And here upon earth's noonward height
To feel the always coming on
The always rising of the night:

To feel creep up the curving east
The earthy chill of dusk and slow
Upon those under lands the vast
And ever climbing shadow grow

And strange at Ecbatan the trees
Take leaf by leaf the evening strange
The flooding dark about their knees
The mountains over Persia change

And now at Kermanshah the gate
Dark empty and the withered grass
And through the twilight now the late
Few travelers in the westward pass

And Baghdad darken and the bridge
Across the silent river gone
And through Arabia the edge
Of evening widen and steal on

And deepen on Palmyra's street
The wheel rut in the ruined stone
And Lebanon fade out and Crete
high through the clouds and overblown

And over Sicily the air
Still flashing with the landward gulls
And loom and slowly disappear
The sails above the shadowy hulls

And Spain go under and the shore
Of Africa the gilded sand
And evening vanish and no more
The low pale light across that land

Nor now the long light on the sea:

And here face downward in the sun
To feel how swift how secretly
The shadow of the night comes on…



Archibald Macleish (1892 -1982 ) was born outside of Chicago, studied at Yale and was first in his class at Harvard law school (smarty!). He volunteered as an amblulance driver during World War I and later served as an artillery captain. After the war, he quit law because it distracted him from his poetry.



Andrew Marvell